I believe in objectification. Meaning, I believe it’s an inescapable part of the human experience. Most of us are sexual creatures. Most of us are visually oriented to various degrees. We look. I look. My blue collar desert town is a home to throngs of cute women rocking inexpensive clothes with the kind of authentically cultivated style most fashion week models can’t touch, and svelte men in Wranglers and weathered shirts who carry their bodies with a grace learned from ceaseless oil rig shifts. I see them, and often I want them. It is human nature that draws our eyes and desires towards what we find beautiful or compelling. In those moments of looking it is an objectification. We do not know the desired in any personal way. In our gaze they are not a person, but a canvas for our mind to color, a thing, a literal object.

What do you see? A prostitute? A pair of legs? An object? Or a human being? (Photo courtesy of Tomas Castelazo)

When I stare at a roughneck he has no girlfriend, no wife, no children, no friends. He is mine and mine only. There is nothing wrong with this fantasy born from the longing of our human brains and the wants of our bodies. It starts getting tricky when the object becomes a human. Our humanity is gauged by whether or not we allow this movement to happen. If I see the roughneck at a bar later and learn his name is Tyler, hear him talk about his divorce and the two kids caught in the middle, do I let this information make him more of a person in my eyes, or do I resist? As he speaks he is more himself and less mine, becoming more distinct and differentiated.

The twentieth century French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas argued that culture and thought in Western civilization are marked by an “allergy to the other.” He is referring to the tendency in human history on both societal and individual levels to brace against the self-expression of any person or persons that are divergent from ourselves. Those who we cannot understand, or refuse to understand, we either prevent from self-expression, or we destroy.

Maybe Tyler’s story isn’t to my liking, but still I want to keep him physically around so I can live in my fantasy of him. Maybe I change topics when his kids come up in conversation after we smoke a cigarette together in the warm desert night. As my mind pieces him together it discards the pieces that don’t fit. It is a circus-like mind performance of destruction and desire. When we fuck at the end of the night he is still the object I created, and as an object I get to use him for what I wanted.

Emmanuel Levinas, twentieth century French philosopher. (Photo courtesy of Bracha L. Ettinger)

I can relate to Tyler. I’m a sex worker. I make a living in this fantasy world of objectification. There are many of us. From porn performers to pro-Dommes, to escorts, the sex industry in the United States is huge. Huge and disparaged. Much of our work is either illegal or sits in legal grey zones. The people who are paid to write and speak publicly about us and our work often do so with ridicule and moral condescension (see Neil Steinberg in The Chicago Sun-Times and Katha Pollitt in The Nation for recent troubling examples). It is common for us to get arrested, jailed, and prevented from attending school. When we move into other fields of work our livelihoods are often jeopardized by the threat that knowledge of our former work might be made public.
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The level of social isolation that can creep into many of our lives can be just as destructive. People in my life are divided into two categories: those who know, and those who don’t. It is a tiring double consciousness that slowly destroys my sense of integrity. The lies, omissions, and self-censoring are like tiny wrecking balls. Each falsehood makes me less me and more the person that people want me to be. My individuality is erased, I become a part of the fantasy of who many people think I am and what makes them comfortable.

Essentially, it’s hard out there for a whore. Thankfully, the sex worker’s rights movement is growing. Although serious challenges to criminalization are being waged, counter movements are active as well. I recently became aware of the banking crackdown on sex workers. In particular, the payment processing site PayPal has started shutting down sex worker’s accounts, even the accounts of sex workers whose work is legal, or who are receiving funding for non-sex work enterprises. (Read more here) In addition, Chase Bank and City National Bank have also been closing the accounts of sex workers, including sex workers being paid for legal work. (Read more here)

Let’s use our imaginations for a moment. Think about waking up to an email informing you that a primary avenue through which you receive income is being shut down. Think about the way you pay your bills, your debts, your rent or mortgage payment, your car payment, how you pay for the electric, gas, and water. Think about how you buy food. Now make some coffee and take a deep breath.

I have been lucky. I don’t use PayPal much and do not do my banking with either City National or Chase. But, it is the beginning of a troubling trend. In addition to social stigmas, sex workers are facing a new round of economic control. This control threatens our ability to tend to the financial realities of life, and more importantly, to live our lives in ways that are practical, meaningful, and consistent with our sense of self. Impeding access to the machinery of the marketplace is a form of destruction. It is saying to sex workers: “We do not understand or approve and we will use our considerable power to stop you.”

The hypocrisy is easy to see. How many porn clips have these (mostly men) watched? How many cam models have they paid? How many escorts have they visited? If you filled a city with only the sex workers that have serviced the employees of PayPal, City National, and Chase, how big would the city be? The size of Dallas, of Seattle, perhaps New York? And God bless. We are here for you my loves, even when you try to hurt us.

Sex work is known as the worlds oldest profession. Objectification is even older. (Painting: Spring Pastimes by Miyagawa Isshô)

I suspect that Levinas was right when he invoked the metaphor of “allergy.” The other is not allowed to be, separate and self-contained. Instead it is subjected to a system that responds by pushing it away, containing it, and eventually destroy it. Sex workers can exist as fantasy in society, we can leave our lights on for the rich and powerful and become what they need. It is easy for us to be written about and photographed and pitied. It is easy to reduce us to one-dimensional tropes in movies and TV. It is more challenging, however, if we are seen as fully actualized humans with, at only the very least, the undisputed right to the money we earn.

A version of this story appeared previously on the author’s personal blog, as well as Thought Catalog.